


i feel the crimson on my lips (i feel you beating in my chest)

by leofitz (orphan_account)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, blood cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 14:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1270129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/leofitz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find him in this shell of a room, lashes fluttering like weak bird wings. Empty, but for a hollow, domed machine... and Fitz.</p><p>T.R.A.C.K.S. AU. Fitz is shot, instead of Skye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i feel the crimson on my lips (i feel you beating in my chest)

They find him in this shell of a room, lashes fluttering like weak bird wings. Empty, but for a hollow, domed machine... and Fitz.

Propped up haphazardly against the doorframe, Coulson kneels first, beside him. The skin around his half-closed eyes pales with each moment, lending his cheeks a dangerous pallor.

Jemma’s vision blurs around the edges, white-noise adrenaline roaring in her ears. Crouching, she presses, gingerly, two fingers to the place where he’s barely holds his skin together, and they come away the same red that winds from his lips.

“Oh, Fitz,” she says, softly.

“He’s been shot,” Coulson tells her, as though she couldn’t already know.

“Keep him upright,” she instructs, automatically, and lays her hands back on. Either his heart falters under her palms, or it’s her own shaking hands. Under leaking fingers he makes a soft, trapped sound. She breathes out an apology, and presses harder.

"Hang on, hang on," she begs, raking the room over by sight. She holds Fitz together as Coulson feels first for breath — and, finding none reliable, a pulse — and it’s nearly impossible to bite down the urge to lift one hand to tap at the side of his face, just keep him awake as long as possible.

"Hang on, Fitz,” she says again, and in the dim light her desperate eyes light again on the domed machine. Her racing mind identifies it to be a hyperbaric chamber, an apparatus frequently used for the treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning, thermal burns, decompression sickness… as well as exceptional blood loss.

“I’ve got no pulse.” Coulson interrupts her train of thought. Looking up, she finds Ward at her side, Skye beside him.

Eyes back on Fitz, she leadens her resolve. “Put him in there,” she says, inclining her head to the corner of the room.

Ward squints at her. “Do you even know what this thing is?”

She cuts her eyes across to him, decisive. “It’s a hyperbaric chamber,” she says, sharply, “and I said put him in there, _now_.”

It takes combined effort to lift him with minimal damage, but May has arrived and lends a steady grip.

Without a partner, Jemma works double-time to stabilize both him and the machine. Restless movement in the corner of her eye suggests Ward’s pacing, and, in these moments, all sound goes still.

Beside her, May watches Coulson bites at his lip. The first time he asks, “Is it working?” it bursts out of him too soon for Jemma to tell. She doesn’t answer, because Fitz has yet to take another breath. Working quickly, she lowers his temperature to exactly seven degrees Celsius — forty-four, Fahrenheit — low enough that it just might save his life, but, if maintained too long, might also cause permanent brain damage. 

She needs to get him to a medical facility, and fast.

After a long heartbeat, a lone breath clouds the glass, but it’s too soon for any collective sigh of relief, and the air is thick with copper and fear.

—

The blood that clings to Jemma’s palms is only a fraction of the life she holds in her hands. She slides him, carefully prone, into the hyperbaric chamber, and cannot touch him again -- red sticks, unwashed, in his hair. She can no more straighten the untidy collar than sew up the wound.

_I'll do everything I can to keep him alive._

But she cannot do anything, now, save watch and wait.

In the tiny storage room, she drags cotton swabs across her fingers until they're raw, and, even then, the last flecks of red persist, so she cuts them to the quick just to be done with it. There is no one left for comforting.

—

In the eleventh hour, they make it to a medical facility. And Ward has to hold Jemma back from the operating room, thrashing, until she wears out in his arms. Skye twists her fingers into hers, smoothes her wild hair down, but Jemma is utterly inconsolable with Fitz out of her hands. She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t blink, and, most of the time, she can’t remember if she’s breathing at all.

There’s little to see through the operating window, but she doesn’t stray far, anyway. There’s so much red, too much of it outside of him.

Hours into surgery, Skye takes her firmly by the wrist and pulls her back to the bus. Jemma stands motionless as she tugs her sweater off, pushes her gently into the shower. 

She stays there until the water runs clear.

—

Fitz makes it out of surgery but still hangs, suspended, between life and death for three heavy days.

Even with their clearance, the doctors are reluctant to admit anyone to his room outside of his immediate family, so Jemma suffers for nearly a full day in the waiting room, waiting for admission. Some small, terrified animal twists up in Jemma's chest, struggling against her ribs. He might die, without her. Or -- arguably worse -- he might wake, without her. 

When they finally open the door for her, Jemma finds, under too-bright lights, that someone else has washed the blood out of his hair.

His smallness in the vast expanse of starched white sheets sets a vague patch in her chest aching. She pulls a chair up close, holds tightly to his fingers, and bargains with a God she hasn’t thought about in years.

She knows wholeheartedly that Fitz might laugh at her for this, would likely tell her she's being silly -- but, in a work so wholly dependent upon her own abilities, she thinks that having her own life spun out for her by someone else’s hands might provide some sort of relief. Maybe, there’s science and then there’s God — maybe they’re the same thing — maybe, there’s her own effort and then there’s a larger plan. In case this is so, she bargains with whoever might be listening to keep Fitz a constant at her side, bartering even her own negligible life to keep him here. 

She grips his hand, hard — blood under his nails — and she thinks that if there’s anything that has ever reassured her that the world leans naturally toward goodness, it’s him.

He doesn’t laugh at her, but she wishes he could.

She tries to keep her eyes clear when Skye walks in, tries to look less worn down, but the other girl does not buy her little smile.

(God takes a long time to reply.)

—

The days blur into one agonizing, extended waiting game, and she lives perpetually in the gap between heart spikes and drops. The heart monitor beats as strongly as it can, but his eyes stay fixed firmly shut. 

The silence that grows like weeds in the lab is accusing, and she becomes increasingly reluctant to work on the tables where his books collect dust. 

Coulson doesn't say a word when she moves her work to his hospital room. 

In the mornings, she still makes two cups of tea, and washes out the cold one again before bed. She begins to take two ibuprofin with each glass of water, headaches from the harsh hospital lights collecting behind her eyes. The hospital staff mistakes her more than once for his girlfriend, and sometimes she does not correct them.

Hesitant, at first, her fingers trace eventually with confidence over his face in sweeping strokes, seeking out the lines of his cheekbones, his forehead, his nose, like they are a map that could tell her anything. Until she knows by touch what her eyes know by sight, and it's more out of a desperation for comfort than anything else.

Day and night, she’s stuck by his bedside since he came out of surgery, and her team, in turn, has been reluctant to leave either of them. The team — Skye, especially — tries to help her, to fill in the holes, they come into the medical wing with voices that are alternately too loud and too soft for this container. They bring her papers and books and coffee and food and company, and she is ashamed that it is not enough.

She talks to him like he could possibly hear her, and maybe he can.

"I don't know what to do, Fitz," she says, one night very far past dark, hands shaking on the edge of his with exhaustion and caffeine. Stuck on paperwork she's requested to keep her busy, stuck on a formula that feels like it should come to her like breathing, but won't; she rubs at the place that throbs behind her eyes, eyes red with sleeplessness and tilts her head into her hands. Pleads, through a closing throat, "Tell me what to do?”

He is silent.

—

Jemma looks to Coulson, with all his wounds, and then to Fitz, and some small, dark corner of her wonders if she could do to him what was done by Nick Fury. Self-sacrifice has its limits, and losing him would be damage unsustainable.

She sits beside him and studies his face. Paler than usual, chapped lips. Messy hair. She sees him like this, and she thinks,  _Could I do that to him?_

Turning over his hand in hers, she thinks that maybe she doesn't want to be selfless.

—

In the days and eventual weeks that follow, she learns reluctantly to navigate around the Fitz-shaped fissure in her life. She tells herself that, yes, silence is not preferable, but she did, she  _does_  have an existence outside of  _Fitzsimmons,_ and she can do it again.

She does her own research, makes every single one of her own meals, and sleeps in her own room. She does not make pesto aioli, and forgoes tea for coffee. It's an inadequate life, on all accounts, but it's... manageable. Carving out a space by his bed to work, half the room cluttered with books and talking to him like he could possibly hear, well. It almost becomes bearable. Walking in every morning to see him lying prone does not every time feel like having the breath punched out of her.

She's almost, almost adjusted, the day his heart monitor dips sharply. She's in the hospital cafeteria when it happens. A few on the team of doctors she knows is assigned to Fitz go brisk-walking past.

Heart in her throat, she runs after a doctor, silently begging him to turn off at any other room but his.

No such luck.

She whispers whatever words she can find into his palm -- the only part of him she can reach, as the doctors swarm like flies around him. Soft hair spilling onto his sheets where she leans in close. At first, she maintains some semblance of syntax, but, eventually, all of the words run together.

\--

The first conscious breath Fitz draws in is sharp, like swallowing glass. Waking is emerging to the sound of her from under deep water; the harsh overhead light comes to him in blurred shapes, but there's a very distinctly warm weight against him.

Slowly, sound makes it way to his ears. Her lips move against his palm, words, too soft for him to hear -- but the cadence lingers like a prayer.

“Don’t be silly, Jemma,” he gets out in the clearest voice he can manage. Around him, shapes still, and he feels the air go out of the room.

In wonder, she sits up. Studies his face for a moment, brushes the stray hair out of his eyes, then. Buries her face in his neck, and cries unashamedly. 

And he's too stiff and in too much pain, but he manages to lift a few fingers to soothe circles into her shoulder, eyes closed. He's exhausted, but he gets out, _"It's only a flesh wound,"_ and she chokes out a laugh because it's so  _stupid --_  he's almost died, he's been out for weeks, and he's trying to make her laugh. 

Fingers twisting in his shirt, she does not leave him alone again. 

Even if it means sleeping on the hard plastic chairs by his bedside until he can be moved into his own room on the Bus, she stays with him there until he's mobile again.

By some small miracle, he has come back to her. 

It takes her a very long time to relax enough to sleep while he rests. The first night is terrifying, and Jemma is half-tempted to find new ways to _accidentally_ rouse her him from sleep every hour or so. Just to make sure she will. Just to make sure she can. She doesn't, though.

Slowly, breathing starts to come easier, once again. Slowly, the sunlight starts to come back into her life. The first week, she sleeps with him tucked up in her arms, as comfortably as they can. Desperately afraid that she is only taking in an elaborately painted dream, she does not let go of him for a solid week.

Every sun, though, brings a new day, and him, with it. This must be what it is to thaw.

**Author's Note:**

> Written largely thanks to great inspiration from Laura ([jemmastan](http://tmblr.co/mWLDV47DiyHqQLYuld2o3FA)). Corresponding photoset can be found [here](http://rainamavias.co.vu/post/78595529108/t-r-a-c-k-s-au-fitz-is-the-one-shot-requested).
> 
> Thank you for reading! As always, commentary and constructive criticism are very much appreciated, if you can spare the time. ♥


End file.
